Servo Architecture: Safety and Performance
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an exciting look at how a browser can be rebuilt for performance and safety, including the WebRender ideas that fed into Firefox Quantum.
What it is
Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2017 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec yoasif_ · 2017-01 · on “I cannot continue working on my add-ons”
There seem to be a lot of people that are saying "oh, without XUL based extensions, Firefox is just a (worse) Chrome clone, so I might as well just use Chrome." I think what they might be missing is that Mozilla's conclusion is a lot like the people seem to be thinking here -- even though Chrome doesn't have the fancy extensions that are possible in Firefox, many many more people are using Chrome than Firefox, because they see it as a better Firefox. Clearly, that has something to do with either security or performance, where Firefox has a perceived lag. Mozilla is actively working to improve performance, and you may not want to switch to Chrome after all, because Chrome may instead be the p
Recommends NiLSPACE · 2017-04 · on “Mozilla and Microsoft are rebuilding their browsers’ foundations”
If you have the time there is a nice talk about WebRender: [LINK] Here is another great talk: [this video] At ~25:30 he'll also talk a bit about Quantum. In a nutshell WebRender is used to send a web page to the GPU which will paint all divs, borders, shadows, images etc. Currently WebRender is the only component I'm aware of that is inside Firefox Nightly. It's still behind a config though.
Recommends lkbm · 2017-10 · on “The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank”
This is a great explanation. I also recommend Metajack's talk on WebRender in Servo: [this video] Also go read everything else Lin Clark has done. They're pretty great.